‘Things move quickly’: A reporter’s tactics and tales from the campaign trail
Political journalism keeps getting harder in the social media, talk-straight-to-voters era. But recording authentic, real-time public responses to candidates as they crisscross the country remains a craft that matters and a civic responsibility. We asked our national political correspondent how she approaches the work.
Covering a presidential campaign was once considered a glamour assignment – but for the relentless travel, terrible food, impossible deadlines, and sleepless nights. But there was always the possibility of an authentic encounter with the candidate. It might come after an event, on a campaign bus, or while hunkered down in a doughnut shop in a blizzard.
Such extended access to candidates has been “increasingly difficult” in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, says Story Hinckley, the Monitor’s national political correspondent, on our “Why We Wrote This” podcast. “They have more ways to speak directly with voters through social media and less of an incentive to sit down for a long interview, in which they don’t know how their excerpts will be used,” she adds.
At campaign events, the press is often relegated to a roped-off area. For a journalist, insights into public responses to a candidate are the heart of the story. Getting them takes careful planning.
“The vast majority of Americans don’t vote, especially in the primaries,” Story says. “So I want to make sure that I’m talking to the Joe in the parking lot outside of the Hardee’s who isn’t even thinking about [the campaign] yet and doesn’t care.
“You have to be willing to strike out a lot, which means giving yourself a lot of spare time to just drive around and talk to the people who are not in the politics world,” she adds. “It pays off when you get that really thoughtful interview with a stranger.”
Episode transcript
Gail Chaddock: Covering presidential campaigns is one of the great assignments in journalism, and lately one of the hardest. Back in the “boys on the bus” era, journalists could hang out with candidates, know them, sometimes well. The story was what the candidate would tell you, and preferably no one else. Today, getting beyond campaign handlers, past the velvet ropes that so often encompass the traveling press, to report the heart of a story, is a deeper challenge.
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Chaddock: This is “Why We Wrote This.” I’m this week’s guest host, Gail Chaddock. We’re talking with Story Hinckley, national political reporter at the Christian Science Monitor based in Virginia. Welcome, Story.
Story Hinckley: Thank you for having me.
Chaddock: You know, you wrote a piece just before the 2022 midterm elections that I loved reading at the time. The headline was, “From heckled to shut out, covering campaigns is getting harder.” Are you still seeing the severe security measures, the distrust between candidates and journalists assigned to cover them? Is campaign 2024 any better than [campaign] 2022?
Hinckley: So it’s interesting. That was one of the stories where the topic of the story changed on the ground. I went there to actually cover this Pennsylvania candidate’s campaign. And then I realized over the course of trying to do so that doing that was going to be seemingly impossible, given how they were making the press move and sit, and we weren’t even allowed to go to the bathroom on our own. And it was just crazy security precautions. I mean, I don’t even have that when I go to a sitting president’s campaign events. And so, you know, I messaged my editor, Liz, and I said, I think, covering the story is the story in this instance.
And so, I still think that it’s very difficult, and it’s getting increasingly difficult because I think a lot of candidates realize that they need us, the media, less and less. They have more ways to speak directly with voters through social media and less of an incentive to sit down for a long interview, in which they don’t know how their excerpts will be used.
Chaddock: You know, there’s a book that I used to keep by me when I was covering campaigns, “What It Takes: The Way to the White House” by Richard Ben Cramer. A genius book. He covers the 1988 campaign. He started two years early. He got to know six of the candidates extraordinarily well. Unfortunately, it came out in 1992, which was four years after the election. But as an ideal, you know, I’m going in to cover a campaign, I really want to know this candidate very, very well. How do you handle the ideal, especially in the environment you just described. And, is there an alternative to covering a campaign without knowing the candidate really, really well?
Hinckley: Well, I think this is also where it comes in having a great editor. Sometimes as the journalist, you’re very close to the story you’re writing. And sometimes I could want to spend weeks with a piece, but I’ll have my editor Liz Marlantes say, we need to get this out. Things move really quickly in politics, especially now. So I could be working on a big in-depth profile of one of the presidential candidates, and it’s one of those things where you want to balance being thorough with also being timely. If we wait too long, he or she could drop out of the race, and then the story and what I was writing would be somewhat irrelevant.
Chaddock: What can you learn about a candidate from a trip to their hometown?
Hinckley: I think there’s something to be said for seeing a candidate’s childhood home, their high school, the Main Street. Bamberg [South Carolina], Nikki Haley’s hometown, a lot of it is a really depressed area. The main street is one block long, and there’s not one open storefront in the entire stretch, and it is sandwiched on either end by really the only two places to get a meal in the area. Although Haley and her family and her parents, they no longer live in Bamberg, but your hometown can definitely influence who you are as a presidential candidate, just like how it influences you and me and the work we do.
I think a candidate always really thinks that they have a hometown advantage, which is great for Haley, considering that South Carolina is one of the early primary states. But I also found a lot of Republican voters that are still Trump, Trump, Trump. We’ll get more into that as we get closer to the primary.
Chaddock: It’s a very interesting observation. How do you prepare for such a trip?
Hinckley: Well, on a very practical matter, I let my husband know as soon as possible. Sometimes a reporting trip gets planned a day or two in advance. And I’m very lucky that he’s always very understanding and supportive. During campaign season, planning a reporting trip can be a very interesting and complicated matrix. I pull up each candidate’s events page and, let’s say, [Republican presidential candidate and Florida Governor Ron] DeSantis is in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in the morning. But I really want to get to this Haley event on the western side of the state. You have to plan out the events ahead of time to make sure you’re going to have enough time to get in between them, and I always want to have buffer time before and after to speak to people who are attending the events. I always think it’s really interesting to speak to the same voters before and after the event. It’s also more difficult when you have an open primary on both sides. This time we only have a handful of Republican candidates, so it’s a bit more manageable.
Chaddock: And when you get to a place, how do you know who’s going to be interesting to talk to?
Hinckley: It would make my job a lot easier if there was an answer to that question. I think that you have to be willing to strike out a lot, which means giving yourself a lot of spare time to just drive around and talk to the people who are not in the politics world. It’s a certain type of person who is so involved in politics that they go to campaign events. The vast majority of Americans do not. The vast majority of Americans don’t vote, especially in primaries. So, I want to make sure that I’m talking to the Joe in the parking lot outside of the Hardee’s who isn’t even thinking about [the 2024 election] yet, and doesn’t care. That’s interesting. Or is this person thinking about voting for a primary for the first time? That’s also interesting. And then I also pay attention to the parts of town I’m in. Am I in a wealthy suburb? Am I in a majority Black inner city?
And then you also just have to rev yourself up to be prepared to have people just completely ignore you and, you know what, not want to spend their lovely Saturday afternoon talking about politics with a stranger.
Chaddock: Alright, what do you actually say to someone, a stranger you’ve never met before? What’s your opening two sentences?
Hinckley: I have the same. I always try to disarm them with a smile and I try to make it clear as soon as possible that I’m not trying to sell them something. Because a lot of people think that. But I’ll go up to them and say: “Hello, my name is Story Hinckley. I’m a reporter with The Christian Science Monitor. And I’m hoping to ask you a quick question. I’m in town working on a story about the state of the Republican primary. And I’m interested in hearing if voters have any thoughts about Nikki Haley and her candidacy, or just general thoughts on the race. Would you be willing to share anything with me?
Chaddock: You know, when I was doing this, there were four words that I used that, I think, by your manner of saying, you used, too, just not the words: “Can you help me?”
Hinckley: Right.
Chaddock: It’s the most useful four words in journalism, I think. Because it’s remarkable how often people are willing to take time out of what they’re doing and stop and talk.
Hinckley: It never ceases to amaze me. I don’t think I would. But I have people all over the country willing to talk to me about politics. It pays off when you get that really thoughtful interview with a stranger.
Chaddock: How do you know when you’ve found an authentic voice?
Hinckley: I think you can tell in someone’s demeanor when they’re thinking through it in real time with you, and that’s always really interesting. But when they give really honest answers, you can tell that also. When people admit to not voting, that’s also a really honest answer. We see it in polling all the time, more people say they vote than we know actually do vote.
Chaddock: Exactly. You know, the last time you joined us on this podcast, you talked about the power of the echo chamber. You said, “I will hear almost verbatim the same phrases and catchphrases.” What did you mean by echo chamber? And why is it such a problem for a reporter?
Hinckley: I think a lot of it comes from televised news. I think that when we have far right hosts and far left hosts kind of saying the same phrases – and most people get their news from TV – people then will repeat the same phrases. And it’s interesting, I know immediately what news channel they’ve been watching, but I’m thinking: “Do you actually agree with that?”
Chaddock: I had to do a profile about Nancy Pelosi once when she was Speaker [of the House]. And I interviewed lots of people, and they all said exactly the same thing initially. I don’t know when she sleeps. I don’t know when she sleeps. She was a very kind of controlling speaker. And if you said something she didn’t like, there was often a penalty down the road someplace. But I remember thinking, when I heard the same phrase over and over: “I’m doomed. I can’t possibly write a profile that means anything if everyone says the same thing.”
You know, there’s a formula for covering presidential campaigns. You report the changes in polling. And then you go somewhere and add local color as appropriate. And then you move on to the next state. What’s wrong with that approach?
Hinckley: We’ve learned in recent elections that polling isn’t everything. Polling has flaws and a lot of polls are different too. Some are great, some are not so great. I think that when you get down to it, a lot of the old-school, telltale signs of a politician’s strength, the size of a crowd, the enthusiasm of a crowd, that does mean something.
Chaddock: Yes. The enthusiasm especially. You can tell the difference between manufactured enthusiasm, like everybody’s wearing the same T-shirt, that’s a little bit like everybody saying the same phrase. What does genuine enthusiasm look like?
Hinckley: I think about: “When is the event taking place?” You know, did someone have to dip out of work to come see this candidate at a local mill down the street? Or, you know, is this a Saturday morning and this woman is really interested in Nikki Haley, and she made her husband and kids tag along?
And I also think that when there’s people outside of the campaign event, that aren’t participating in the primary apparatus and going to events, and they’re interested in a candidate and they can explain to me, how or why. When people donate money, any amount of money, to a candidate these days, that means something.
Chaddock: As you know, you always ask the toughest questions at the end of an interview to avoid having the interviewee walk out on you. You should know that I was born and now live in New Hampshire and am fiercely loyal to that state. And my question is this: Which state deserves to be first in the nation primary? New Hampshire or South Carolina?
Hinckley: [Laughs.] Well, like so many things in the political world, I try very hard not to have personal opinions to be able to do my job well. But I can see both sides of it. I really can. When I’m in New Hampshire, and I’m talking to voters who have for decades visited every single presidential candidate when they’re in town, there’s something really special to the tradition that New Hampshire has. But at the same time I also understand the argument of: “Everyone else should get a turn too.” Whether or not we like it, winning the first or first several primaries really does decide campaigns and can end some and power boost others. So I understand both arguments.
I do think though, that something we should be paying attention to is the Democratic primary in New Hampshire. President Biden is not on the ballot officially in New Hampshire. So we have this situation where. If our sitting president wins the first primary election, this one in New Hampshire, it’ll be because voters came and wrote in his name. Or if they just go to check off different names, they’ll just see other Democratic candidates and other third party candidates and Republican candidates.
Chaddock: Well, I think you should definitely come back, and I have an excellent idea where you should stay.
Hinckley: Oh, good.
Chaddock: Story, thank you so much for being with us today. Much appreciate your time.
Hinckley: Of course. Thank you.
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Chaddock: And thanks to our listeners. You can find more, including our show notes, with a link to the stories we discussed in this podcast, at csmonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. This episode was hosted by me, Gail Chaddock, edited and produced by Clay Collins, Jingnan Peng, and Mackenzie Farkus. Our sound engineers were Tim Malone and Alyssa Britton, with original music by Noel Flatt. Produced by The Christian Science Monitor. Copyright 2024.
